ROME – Magistrates were investigating Tuesday a sinister rally of thousands of Italian Fascists making straight-armed ‘Roman’ salutes screaming ultra-right slogans that was held in the Eternal City Sunday to commemorate the killing of three right wing militants in 1978, judicial sources said. The unsavoury gathering in the via Acca Larentia is an annual event among proto-fascists but drew a larger than usual crowd of latter-day Blackshirts, raising concern among opposition politicians over where Italy is heading under the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has its origins in the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) party founded by followers of World War Ii dictator Benito Mussolini.

 The Blackshirts, estimated by observers to be number over 2000, gathered to recall the Jan.7, 1978, murder of MSI militants Franco Bigonsetti and Francesco Ciavatta by left-wing extremists in front of the historic MSI party office in the via Acca Larentia, while a third neo-Fascist, Stefano Recchioni, was shot and killed the same day during clashes with police.

 The opposition Democratic Party called for the organisers to be prosecuted. Supporting Fascism is a crime in Italy albeit one that is rarely invoked.

 While Ms Meloni claims to have ditched the post-Fascist views she held as a young MSI militant, her Brothers of Italy party refuses to remove the MSI tricolour flame symbol from its party logo and many commentators are concerned by her plans to change the Italian constitution to allow direct election with a relative majority vote of future prime ministers, rather than their being appointed by the head of state.

 jp